Celebrating the heroes of the fight against
fascism—Palestine-Berlin underground (Second of two parts)

By Hans Lebrecht, People's Weekly World, 11
November 1995

TEL-AVIV—In May 1937, after receiving my diploma I became
unemployed and had no hope of work in my profession. So I turned to my
underground friends, volunteering for real and active anti-fascist
activity. They told me to go to the Palestine Bureau in Berlin,
Meinecke St. 10, and ask to meet a certain Berthold (I forget the
family name). He would advise me about a possible further underground
career. I was astonished, since the Palestine Bureau was the
headquarters of the Zionist organization in Germany and I never even
thought of becoming a Zionist, or emigrating to Palestine, but had
many, sometimes quite heated arguments with Zionists at the time.

Berthold told me I had to get a good cover in addition to being a son
of a well-known bourgeois industrialist. So they thought to make out
of me a trustworthy Zionist. In fact, the Nazi regime and the Gestapo
cooperated at the time to some extent with the Zionists, mainly out of
their common strategic aim—to relieve Germany of as many Jews as
possible. At that time, the Nazis had not yet designed the
Endloesung, the physical annihilation of German and European
Jewry.

Berthold and some young women comrades who secretly worked in the
Palestine Bureau for the Communist Party and its underground sent me
in September 1937 to Palestine as a guiding instructor of a Youth
Aliya (Zionist Youth for Palestine) group of about 50 youths aged
9-14. I remained in Palestine for about four weeks, spending most of
the time with my already then beloved girlfriend, and later my
lifelong companion Tosca, who was already in Palestine, after which I
returned to Germany as a recognized Zionist youth instructor.

Back in Germany, I was sent to be secretary of a small group of young
prospective Zionist settlers on a preparatory professional course to
learn agricultural labor, working on a large farm in southern Germany,
not far from the Austrian and Swiss border. I knew the region well
from previous hiking and skiing trips on both sides of the border.

When there was no other job to do, I milked cows and raised calves and
piglets. Sometimes, after a coded telephone message, I had to go to
town, officially to attend to matters of the Zionist group. In fact, I
was engaged in smuggling people and money across the green
border, the men and women to join the German Thaelmann
Battalion, fighting with the Spanish Republicans against the
fascist onslaught of Franco and their Italian and German collaborators
upon the legal republican regime; the money went to finance the
battalion.

Among the people I smuggled over the border were not a few who
succeeded in escaping from Gestapo detention and even from
concentration camps. On the way, after we were safe across the border,
I heard many a story of the horrible fate of the detained and tortured
opponents of the Hitler regime. I relayed these reports back to my
superiors in the underground. I believe that I did a small, but
important job against the Nazis, strengthening somehow the
revolutionary anti-fascist forces that fought against the inhuman
fiend with arms in their hands. I wished I could be one of
them—but my orders were to do my job here, on the underground
home front. Retrospectively, I think I was not aware, or did not care
too much about the dangers to my person, or that of my
comrades-in-arms, by doing my clandestine job. All that was against
the hated Nazi regime, was good and worthwhile for me.

After about 10 months, I was warned that the Gestapo had issued a
warrant for detaining me and two other of my fellow activists, and
that most probably their men were waiting for us in the border
region. We were instructed to stop immediately our activity. I was
ordered to leave the farm and await further orders.

I left the farm and traveled to Nuremberg to contact my superiors in
the underground. Our standing order was, in case of danger to our
activity, to travel to the southern French port Marseilles and there
to apply to the recruiting office of the International Brigades in
Spain. But at the time—autumn 1938—the Franco hordes
already had overrun the republican army, and the International
Brigades crossed into France and demobilized. So our standing order
became obsolete, and I did not know what to do. After some
deliberations, I was advised again to turn to my friends at the
Palestine Bureau in Berlin who would provide me with an entrance visa
into Palestine for three months as a tourist. I was quite glad to
leave Hitler's fascist Thousand Year Reich and had no
intention to return to Germany, except after the elimination of the
Nazi specter.

Right after the nationwide November 1938 anti-Jewish pogrom, during
which 91 Jews were killed and tens of thousands were gravely injured
and incarcerated in concentration camps, nicknamed by the Nazis as
Kristallnacht as if only glass and crystal was broken during
that pogrom, the German Communist Party (KPD) was the only force in
Germany proper that published, and widely distributed as clandestine
leaflets, a declaration under the headline: The Disgrace of the
Anti-Jewish Pogrom. In it, the KPD condemned the pogrom and warned
that this was the opening signal for an aggressive war against the
nations of Europe and an all-out mass murder of Jews. I left the Nazi
Reich just a few weeks before that infamous pogrom.

After Hitler's starting the war in Europe, and especially after
the German invasion into the Soviet Union, I tried to join the British
army to fight Nazi Germany, but was rejected because of my record of
having spent (1940/41) some time in the British colonialist Central
prison in Acre, Palestine, as a sympathizer of the outlawed
Palestinian Communist Party, and because of a chronic dysentery (I am
still suffering from), I had contracted in jail.

The prison where I met for the first time Jewish and Arab Communists
face to face, was a good educational experience that convinced me to
join the Party as an active member. I was arrested by the British
police for being an illegal immigrant, a tourist who overstayed
his residence as tourist in Palestine for two-and-a-half
years. However, during the interrogations at the Haifa headquarters of
the CIC (the British Intelligence), the interrogators knew very well
about my activity in the Communist underground in Germany, as well as
my connections with the British Communist Party. So, after I paid my
symbolic fine of one shilling (almost worth a day's work at the
time) for being an illegal immigrant, I remained detained under
suspicion of being a Communist. Shortly after the release from prison,
I joined the Palestinian Communist Party.

After Hitler's army invaded the Soviet Union (June 22, 1941),
Great Britain and the Soviet Union became allies in the war against
Nazi Germany. Following this, the Palestinian CP went into the open,
to continue, now legally, the 20-year common Arab-Jewish struggle
against the oppressive British colonial rule in the country.

From 1929 to 1939, the British colonialists, often in connivance with
the Zionist leadership and the Zionist trade-union Federation
Histadrut, deported more than 2,000 Jewish Communists from Palestine
to the countries they emigrated from in Europe, among them also Nazi
Germany. So if I have been detained earlier, it may well be that I
would have been deported, too—may be even back to Hitler
Germany.

During the war Tosca and I found many left-wing comrades in the
British army. In May 1945, we were invited by British friends to a
victory celebration to the Royal Air Force base near Petah-Tiqva. We
were favorably surprised to find that only in front of the base
headquarters the British colors, the Union Jack, was hoisted and a
picture of King George hung over the entrance, while almost all other
barracks were decorated with red flags and pictures of Stalin. The
Soviets, led by Stalin, had been the main victors in the war and
suffered the greatest loss in Europe, our friends explained.

I am sorry and upset that now, as an active member of the CP and the
progressive peace camp in Israel, I still have to fight fascism. I am
currently a member of the leading bureau of the International
Federation of Resistance Fighters. The fight against neofascism in
Europe and throughout the capitalist world continues. This includes
against the fascist hoodlums in Israel who attempt to torpedo the
peace efforts between Israel and the Palestinians.